an impulse to tell the news. This impulse is felt perhaps in all the
arts, but most in books and in the theatre, less in music, still less in
painting, and least in architecture and sculpture. From these last we can
learn, if we need a reminder, what are the conditions of enduring art,
and what, in contrast to popularity, is fame. Sculpture and architecture,
from the substantial nature of their medium, must submit to be looked
at more than once, to be lived with, finally to be judged by the good
opinions of many men over a long period of time; and a good opinion
of such work, so lived with, will depend less on the first impression
than on habitual contact. For such work popularity is difficult, if not
impossible. A book about the war may be a popular book; the Farragut
statue in Madison Square is not a popular statue. What statue is
popular? It can have only the better kind of success, if any; like the
Farragut, it can be famous, loved and returned to over an indefinite
length of time. For we can read a book once and throw it aside, or hear
music or see a play but once, and then criticize it; it lies entirely
in our choice whether we shall read or hear twice. How different our
criticism would be if it were based on at least half a dozen readings
and hearings! But the bronze and the building are not easily removed
or ignored, and even the painting has a good chance of being looked at
more than once. It is not surprising then that the sculptor, like the
architect or the painter, attends to the conditions on which fame is
secured, since popularity is denied him, and makes his appeal to revised
judgments and to second thoughts.
It would be a misfortune to seem to say that the author who misses
popularity is necessarily an artist, or that even temporary success is
not to be admired. But in American letters we are beginning to wonder
why our great successes are so transitory; why a writer who sells more
copies of his first book than did Thackeray or Dickens, does not continue
like them to reach a large public with succeeding books; and why he does
not, like them, continue to be read after he has ceased to write. The
explanation suggested is that most American writers, not only today but
throughout the last twenty-five years, have written as journalists—have
put out their material not as life but as news about life, and the
critics have discussed it as news, and the readers have come to look
for the news in it, and for nothing else. Some novelists still writing
began their work with successful stories of local color, which we read
in order to learn about Louisiana or Pennsylvania or the Middle West,
and having got the information we were looking for, we went elsewhere to
look into other novelties. It goes without saying that in this process we
readers have done injustice to many a work of art; _Old Creole Days_ and
_Main Traveled Roads_ have something for the permanent reader, as well as
for the news-seeker, and _Trilby_—to speak of an English book—is still
a magnificent romance of friendship and chivalry, though it expired of
its own success as a bulletin from the Latin Quarter and a document in
hypnotism.
At least, says again the lover of current things, you must write in the
language of the hour. Some beauty is lost when the poet does not speak
in his native tongue, or when we cannot read him in it. Well, some
languages are better than others; Greek was a better language, more
precise, more varied, more forceful and more colorful, than English or
any of the modern tongues. But all language changes, as the works of art
in language do not; in literature we have this haunting paradox, that
through a temporary medium we can build something imperishable. Much
as we may dislike literature in translation, it is perhaps salutary to
remember that literary masterpieces must survive in translation or not at
all. In what language were the parables spoken? If Homer were not Homer
still in English or French or German, how much of Homer would the world
know? Some bouquet of his own time is gone, but perhaps we should not
have liked it if it had remained. At least we have kept what we liked;
we have kept what suited our spiritual needs, we have loved Andromache
and Hector, and wondered in the old way why such fine men as Achilles and
Agamemnon should quarrel, and have decided, as all our fathers have done,
that for so beautiful a woman as Helen to waste her time on so mean a
fellow as Paris, there must have been queer influences at work. To live
in art in this timeless way, is to satisfy what is eternal in ourselves;
it is to leave behind us the limitations of our hour, our place, and our
language. And unless art is wide enough for us to live in it so, we shall
trifle with it only for an hour, and without regret let it go the way of
other contemporary things.
V
THE CHARACTERS PROPER TO LITERATURE
I
Our impulse might be to say that any character at all is proper to
literature, or to any phase of literature, for we have long ago discarded
that convention of ancient story which introduced the hero and heroine
always as nobly born, or if at first they were not gentlefolk, yet in the
last chapter they were shown to be prince and princess in disguise. Our
leading characters now may have whatever origin God wills; the author
does not interfere. No longer do we reserve the peasant, the poor or
the ignorant for the foot of our list of _dramatis personæ_, nor do we
smuggle them into the scene at resting moments, for comic relief. Since
human nature is the subject of art, and since the Almighty (we quote
Lincoln for this) showed us where to put the emphasis in human nature,
by creating common folk in the vast majority, we have even followed the
example with an excess of enthusiasm, until the elect are pretty well
put down from their former seat in literature, and in their stead are
the socially humble and the mentally weak. For a hundred years or more
we have been pressing this charitable revolution. Wordsworth, though
not the first to try it, first won a considerable hearing in English
poetry for the beggar, the pedlar, the afflicted, the half-witted—a
hearing for them, that is, as central figures in the poems where they
occur; and shortly afterwards the novelists, on the irresistible tide of
humanitarianism, invited not only our attention but our admiration for
persons who hitherto had seemed obscure and unfortunate. Dickens perhaps
went too far, we now feel; he demonstrated the weakness of the gentry,
and sent them to the background of the story, where we are willing enough
they should remain, but he also tried to endow the lower classes with
so much delicacy, tact, and spirit that his leading persons seem to be
gentry still, masquerading in a temporary eclipse of fortune, like the
lost prince and princess of the fairy tale. But he taught us how to carry
on his unfinished revolution; since he stripped sentimentality, all that
sort of nonsense, from the gentry, we have known at last how to strip it
from the bourgeois. Some of our novelists riddle the polite world for us,
others tell us the unflinching truth about our middle classes. We have no
heroes; any character can get into our literature, if we may use him as
a target rather than worship him as a god.
It is too late to return, even if we desired to do so, to the sentimental
misreading of social conditions against which our modern realism, however
grim, tries honestly to protest, and there is a form of discourse in
which human frailties can properly be discussed; social science or the
science of ethics would neither of them deserve the name of science
if we excluded from their consideration any aspect of human character
or conduct—just as medicine would fail in its office if we forbade it
to study any part or function of the body. But it is not too late to
ask ourselves the difference between science and art; between a story
which represents our physical actions with that conscience in detail
which would aid a medical diagnosis, and a story through which Helen’s
body walks, a joy forever; between a record of our neighbors just as
they are, or a bit meaner, and a picture of men and women as we would
gladly be. Anything printed may be called literature, even last year’s
time-tables, but if we preserve in the word an emphasis upon art rather
than upon information, we may ask after all whether certain characters,
or certain attitudes toward character, are not essential to art; or,
putting it another way, we may ask whether the type of character we
portray will not determine the kind of art we produce, with or without
our will, and whether the kind of character we portray will not finally
classify our writing for us as art or as social document.
To have our novel appraised as a social document may seem to us a
compliment, and we may be glad to escape the equivocal verdict that our
picture of life is art. The terms are unimportant and our prejudices in
words may be respected. But the fact remains that some books we are
to read many times, and permanently, whereas others are for a season
only, and may be read but once; and books which must serve us in ways so
different would seem to need certain special privileges of method and
material—they may even be permitted certain varieties of emphasis not
usually found in life. The temporary writing helps us on our way, and
we ought to have one honorable name for it all—newspapers, telephone
directory, time-tables, all our telegrams and most of our letters. We
stop over them only for a moment, in order to go about our business more
conveniently. But the other kind of books will detain us forever, or
will try to—and this kind of literature is art; we return thither for no
information and for no immediate aid in our daily affairs, but rather to
taste again an experience we enjoyed before, to meet old friends, to
breathe an atmosphere which we crave, and which is hard to find elsewhere.
If this distinction needs often to be made between the literature which
is information and the literature which is art, it is because both kinds
of book use the same medium, and speech is the commonest of mediums.
Painting or music escape such a confusion, but writing is a slippery
craft, now running to a bare record or to good advice, now drifting
into a music of words, articulating a beauty that seems ageless and
impersonal, and sometimes doing a bit of all these things at once. In
daily conversation, when we talk of anything in human interest, we use
the same words as literature is made of; what more natural than to
conclude that literature therefore may deal with any subject we talk of?
We resent the suggestion that art should be narrower than life itself.
Yet if we admit any difference at all between art and life, between
literature and our average conversations, between books which give
information and books which give delight, and if art is the record of
that aspect of life we delight in not for the moment but permanently,
then art is indeed narrower than life itself; outside of it will remain
the trivial things, however likable, of our daily round, which we forget
gladly, so many other pleasant and trivial things supplant them; and
outside of it also will remain very important issues which we hope and
resolve shall be temporary—the grave wrongs and errors which call not for
eternal contemplation but for reform. Face to face with such problems,
we often feel that art is inadequate. What can poetry do for the sick or
the dying? What solace is there in music or sculpture for the wretchedly
poor? The answer to such questions is not in art but in conduct; death
calls for fortitude, sickness must be cured, poverty must be relieved;
and if books deal with such subjects, it is not for a literary end, but
to aid us in practical remedies. Indeed, to have a literary ambition as
we contemplate another’s misery, would seem possible only for a fiend; it
is in the merit of Mrs. Stowe’s story of Uncle Tom that the book seems a
protest from the soul rather than a work of art. If there are sins and
misfortunes, it may be necessary to spread the news, as though the house
were on fire, but if we really care for our house we shall not linger to
enjoy the cadence of the thrilling call. On the other hand, if we are to
lose ourselves in a book or a play, if we are to live in it repeatedly,
ourselves the hero, in love with the heroine, and hating the villain,
then the book or play must give us an experience in some sense better
than the life ordinarily available to us; who would waste a moment
on Cleopatra in a book, if he knew where to find her in the world? Or
perhaps in life she was less charming than Plutarch said she was, or than
Shakespeare showed her to be; perhaps we could not be drawn irresistibly
to her until the poet made her better than she was—made her, that is, a
character proper for the literature which is to be enjoyed as art.
II
The effect of the excellence or the inferiority of the character on
the book was long ago observed by Aristotle, when he said that tragedy
and the epic—that is, all serious literature—will aim at representing
men as better than in actual life, and that comedy and satire will
represent them as worse. In this second kind of writing, he added,
satire came first, and it was Homer who laid down the principles of
comedy, by dramatizing the ludicrous instead of composing personal
satire. This famous observation of the ancient critic has been too often
read as doctrine, as though Aristotle were telling us what should take
place in literature, whereas he is recording what actually does take
place. If you wish to write a story or a play in which the reader can
lose himself with delight, you must portray character better than the
reader, character which in some degree satisfies and strengthens his
aspirations. If you wish the reader to laugh at the world, or to scorn
it, or to feel the need of improving it, you portray for him character
in a condition inferior to his estimate of himself; if you wish him to
profit by that wholesome self-observation which we call the comic-spirit,
you mingle satire with tragedy—you show him character which satisfies his
aspirations, so that he will identify himself with it, and which at the
same time is inferior in some respects to what he would prefer to be, so
that he must laugh at himself. He will have a tendency to save the day
for self-respect by laughing, not at himself, but at human nature, and
the universal comic spirit will then have come to birth, akin to both
satire and tragedy, but more nearly a dramatizing of the ludicrous, as
Aristotle said, than a scoring of personal faults.
These principles, it goes without saying, are not accepted by writers
today; the average author is not aware of them, or if he is, he takes
refuge in another remark of Aristotle’s, that perhaps tragedy was
destined to develop into something different from the type of poetry
produced by Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; perhaps new principles,
we say, in the too familiar formula, are needed for new material. So
think many of our poets and novelists who give us sordid and wretched
characters to contemplate, yet invite us to feel toward them not the
satiric regret, but the old pity and terror of noble tragedy. That
the principles do persist, however, very much as Aristotle described
them, is evidenced by the difficulty the readers still have with such
books; the authors argue their case, or critics argue it for them, but
common humanity remains unconvinced that misery is a proper subject
for permanent contemplation. In our age especially, when the impulse
to social good works is highly developed, it is a curious paradox that
writers should expect us to associate in art, as habitual companions,
with types of character which in real life we should hasten to rescue and
to change. It is generous of the writers to suppose that in a humane age
the reader will be ready to discern the heroic even beneath handicaps
and afflictions, and probably the reader is thus ready, but the writers
forget that in any age, particularly in a humane one, we do not like to
contemplate, in the permanence of art, heroic character smothered beneath
handicaps and afflictions. And in justice to the embarrassed reader it
should be added that often the character is not heroic at all, and the
only claim put forth for it is that it might have been attractive if it
had not been smothered.
Perhaps it is the influence of Wordsworth that still spreads this
confusion in our writing. The effect of many of his best known poems
has never been wholly satisfactory, not even to his admirers; he drew
moral lessons from objects humble or mean, and since his own interest
was in the moral lesson, he sometimes was careless of the emotional
appeal which the object, left standing as it were in the poem, might
make on the reader. In one sense he was not a nature-lover, though he
had recourse to nature for ethical wisdom; it was only the wisdom he
cared about, and we have an unpleasant impression, which perhaps does
him injustice, that when he had got a moral idea out of the primrose
by the river’s brim, he was through with the primrose for the day. The
same impression, unfortunately, is made by his portrayal of humble or
mean characters. He obviously does not identify his better fortunes
with their misery, nor does he enter dramatically or imaginatively into
their lives; he is content to draw a moral from them, and the reader,
in his day and still in ours, is surprised that misery in the picture,
having produced a moral, is promptly dropped as though of no further
concern. The old leech-gatherer serves a purpose when his courage
against frightful odds cheers up a moodish poet; the old beggar at the
door moves us to gratitude that another man’s poverty keeps fresh in
us our springs of charity. Much good this does the leech-gatherer or
the beggar! And if there is to be no help for them, their presence is a
bit disturbing in the background of so much complacence. We wish there
were more tenderness in these poems that talk so much of feeling. And
when Wordsworth deliberately sets out to enlist our admiration for the
heroic, we may find ourselves facing such dumb human misery as we have
in _Michael_, the heroism of a wrecked family and an abandoned farm.
With relief we turn to the passages in the _Prelude_ where the poet no
longer looks down benignly on the wretched, but gives expression to the
ideal life which he himself desires to attain; there, where he shows life
better than it is, we can go with him and lose ourselves in the vision.
It is our poets who chiefly defy Aristotle’s wise warning, and try with
Wordsworth to convert into a theme for meditation what is really a
subject for philanthropy. Our novelists tend more and more to give us
an inferior world, but not for our admiration; we may smile at it, or
despise it, or try to cure it. This is satire, an achievement in morals
rather than in art, and from the advertisements on the book covers it
is clear that the publisher at least knows that the author is revealing
something medicinal, something unpleasant but good for us. If we prefer
to write satires, we are at least achieving our ambition. But the reader
of the American novel today, whether he reads Mrs. Wharton, or Sinclair
Lewis, or whether he goes back to an earlier period and reads W. D.
Howells, is usually reading about other people, rarely about himself;
he has noticed those faults in his neighbors before. We have to go far
back in our literature to find a novel in which the American future is
implicit, a story into which we can enter as into a world we are glad is
ours. Perhaps we must go back as far as the _Scarlet Letter_, in which a
modern audacity of thought seems breaking through an antique repression,
and we can identify profound speculations of our own with the wisdom in
Hester’s heart or Arthur Dimmesdale’s. It has been pointed out before
how much Hawthorne gained by making his chief characters noble in the
Greek way, tragic characters better than in actual life; for the sin of
the woman and the minister was common enough in the world among weak or
vulgar characters, and the impulse even in Hawthorne’s time might well
have been to keep the story, for purposes of edification or realism, in
the low tone in which it first occurred. But we cannot easily take to
heart the sins of people who are obviously our inferiors; only the sins
of good people rouse in us tragic pity or terror, for that is the kind
of sin, if any, we should commit. Hawthorne therefore makes the minister
a saint, and if Hester is not a saint at the beginning, she is so at
the end of her ordeal, and in the sufferings of both our own heart has
been wrung. In the _House of the Seven Gables_, however, the reader is a
looker-on rather than an actor, for the characters are not better than
life, their experience is therefore not ours, and since we cannot cure
their unhappiness, we are sorry to watch it. In that story our greatest
romancer was on the road toward the modern habit of satire, a road which
he had marked out for us clearly enough in some of his early sketches and
tales.
The trend away from the literature of art to the literature of satire
is all the more remarkable in our day because the exigencies of satire
compel the American to deny wholesale his better self. There might be
some apparent reason for not writing in the epic or the tragic tone if in
order to do so we had to assume virtues we all knew we lacked; but why
make a religion of writing satire, when to do so we must conceal the few
virtues we are sure we have? Mr. Howells took it to be his duty to tell
the unvarnished truth about human society as he knew it, but you would
not guess from his novels that America ever produced so charming a man
as Mr. Howells and those literary friends of his of whom, outside his
novels, he wrote lovingly. So Mr. Lewis pictures America today—leaving
out of the picture the satirical criticism of America in which he leads,
and so Mrs. Wharton shows us the narrower world of fashion, with no one
in it so gifted, so admirably trained, as Mrs. Wharton. The best of us
is hard enough to express, as Rabbi Ben Ezra knew, but how odd that we
prefer not to express it, whether difficult or easy—that we deliberately
conceal what we have set our hearts on. We name half a dozen characters
from his plays in whom Shakespeare seems to be portraying himself,
and without too subtle a discrimination we recognize ideals of our own
in all of them. Pendennis seems to be Thackeray himself, and so seems
Henry Esmond and Clive Newcome, and we flatter ourselves that the great
novelist incorporated in those portraits some of our own best features.
We—and Cervantes—are incarnated in Don Quixote.
The contrast between information and art in our books, and the tendency
to stress information with a moral bent, are both thrown into sharper
relief by the success of American architecture in expressing more and
more a significant and lasting beauty. Nothing might seem at first
more utilitarian than a building, and few things in our country seem
less permanent, we have such a passion for altering. Yet art has made
its greatest progress with us in architecture, and the stages of the
progress have been accompanied by just such a selection and choice of
subject as Aristotle’s remarks about character would imply. In our cities
a genuine impulse toward beauty began to show itself two decades ago in
shop-windows. Where else should beauty appear but in the enterprises we
care most about? Since we were lovers of business, we began to indicate
the beauty that business has in our eyes. The shop-window ceased to
be, what in country hardware stores it still often is, a place where
samples of all the merchandise were displayed, an order card from which
you could plan your purchases; it became rather a scene of loveliness
to contemplate for its own sake, an attraction to hold you rooted to
the spot rather than a stimulus to hurry you inside to buy. Probably
the shop-windows in our great streets could not be justified now on a
purely economic basis; they have been lifted into the realm of beauty
and are things to remember. But for this kind of shop-window not every
article the store sells is “proper”, in the Aristotelian sense; nothing
ridiculous is shown, though ridiculous things are bought and sold,
nothing trivial is shown, and nothing that discloses too publicly the
animal conditions in which we lead our spiritual life. With a different
selection of articles which the store for our convenience must sell, we
might have a comic window, the sight of which would cause us to smile
at ourselves, or a satiric one, which would teach us to laugh at our
fellowman.